Want to Save Lives? You Need a Map of What’s Doing Us In

If sorrow were a landscape, here’s how it would look from a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. This graphic maps the global cost of early mortality—some 1.7 billion years of human life forfeited annually—sorted by cause of death. That’s 1.7 billion years of harvests and weddings, of factory work and music lessons and novels and new ideas that were supposed to happen and now won’t.

And get this: Worldwide, about 40 percent of that toll results from disorders (shown in yellow above) that could be avoided with basic medications, clean water, and neonatal care. As you read this, 3,000 young kids are dying from diarrhea that a few zinc tablets might have stopped. Cost: 38 cents per life.

You might wish you hadn’t read that. But it’s the kind of insight that policymakers and NGOs need in order to focus health resources where they can do the most good. That’s why the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the Univer­sity of Washington created the massive database on which this graphic is based. Known as the Global Burden of Disease, it quantifies the incidence and impact of every conceiv­able illness and injury. Want to see your own odds of dying from gunshot or animal attack? You can go to the GBD Compare website and find out.

But IHME doesn’t just tally up death rates, it estimates the years of life lost (YLLs) from all those deaths: A fatal pneumonia infection at age 3 erases many more future birthdays than a heart attack at 80. Adding in years lived with disability, the database provides the most comprehensive measure we have of the burden of disease, in terms of lost human potential. It’s not a pretty picture.

Luckily, policymakers are paying attention. Well-targeted campaigns are reducing mortality from infectious diseases and birth complications throughout the world (as shown by the light shading in the picture above). While more than a million people still die of malaria each year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa, that number is down more than 20 percent since 2005.

These are just a few of the insights offered by GBD Compare. The interactive visualization tool lets you drill down on that global map to compare regions and countries, spot trends, or slice the data by demographic groups. And because the data is structured hierarchically, you can set the resolution to zoom in for more detail or zoom out for big-picture comparisons. The basic inter­face is easy to use, but there’s a helpful video tutorial if you want to dig deeper into the toolbox.

Here are are few screenshots from the website itself. Don’t be thrown by the different color scheme; the “tree map” layout is basically the same as in the artist’s rendering above. The labels are a bit cryptic here, but if you visit the site you can run your cursor over the map to see full descriptive info for every tile.

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Years of life lost in affluent countries, by cause of death. Noncommunicable diseases (in blue here) account for 79 percent of the total. Fatal injuries have steadily declined—with one exception: adverse effects of medical treatment (the unlabeled dark-green square above).

Projecting the data onto a world map lets you compare countries for any disease or category—here, the percent of life-years lost to infectious illnesses, birth disorders, and malnutrition. Not all developed countries are equal; you can see that the US lags behind Canada and Europe.

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Years of life lost by young women in the US. While breast cancer mortality is down, fatal drug overdoses—mainly from prescription opioid pain relievers—are soaring.

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Young men in the US are 67 percent more likely than women to die of violence or accidental injuries.

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GBD Compare also lets you track disease patterns over time. Here, China in 1990 shows the typical profile of a poor rural country, with high child mortality.

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Today, China looks a lot like the West—though some lung diseases are noticeably rampant. One of the fastest-growing problems in China’s feverish economy? Pedestrians getting run over in traffic.

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You can also dig down below the surface to trace the effects of contributing risk factors. For China, this chart shows the portion of years lost from each cause that is attributable to air pollution. Note the impact not just on lung cancer and pulmonary disease (COPD) but also stroke and ischemic heart disease (IHD).

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And you can compare risk factors across countries as well. This shows deaths from any cause—emphysema, cancer, etc.—attributable to air pollution. Evidently communism is bad for air quality, and the effects last: Bulgaria, Ukraine, and some other former Soviet countries have it worse than China.